Load balancers are commonly used in datacenters to spread the traffic load to a number of available computing resources that can handle a particular type of traffic. FIGS. 1 and 2 illustrate two common deployments of load balancers in datacenters today. In FIG. 1, the load balancers 100 are topologically deployed at the edge of the network and between different types of VMs (e.g., between webservers 105 and application servers 110, and between application servers 110 and the database servers 115). The load balancers 100 are in some deployments standalone machines (e.g., F5 machines) that perform load balancing functions. Also, in some deployments, the load balancers are service virtual machines (VMs) that are executing on the same host computing devices that execute the different layers of servers that have their traffic balanced by the load balancers. FIG. 2 illustrates one such deployment of load balancers as service VMs (SVMs).
In the load balancer deployments of FIGS. 1 and 2, the load balancers serve as chokepoint locations in the network topology because they become network traffic bottlenecks as the traffic load increases. Also, these deployments require manual configuration of the load balancers and the computing devices that send data packets to these load balancers in order to allow the load balancers to properly receive and distribute the load balanced traffic. These deployments also do not seamlessly grow and shrink the number of the computing devices that receive the load balanced traffic, as the data traffic increases and decreases.